PEOPLE / Old-line chocolate maker still keeps eye on competition

Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 21, 2005

Gary Guittard with chocolates in the Sadaharu Aoki shop in Paris. Photo by Alison Harris/for the Chronicle.

Gary Guittard with chocolates in the Sadaharu Aoki shop in Paris. Photo by Alison Harris/for the Chronicle.

PEOPLE / Old-line chocolate maker still keeps eye on competition

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Chocolate maker Gary Guittard recently went to Paris on a trip dreams are made of -- to do nothing but taste chocolate.

He spent a day at the Salon du Chocolat, a huge, rambling festival of 150 international chocolate makers and confectioners held in the exposition center at the Porte de Versailles. Later that week he tasted his way through Paris' top candy stores.

"I wanted to taste what is going on in the world of chocolate outside of the United States," said the fourth-generation president of his family's Guittard Chocolate Co. in Burlingame. He also wanted to compare his company's 3-year-old artisanal line, E. Guittard, to the international competition. By the end of his trip, he said, he determined that his product stands up to those of the best European chocolate makers.

Guittard Chocolate Co. produces premium-quality chocolate in syrups, blocks, large chips and powders for home cooks and wholesale customers such as See's Candies. But it is the E. Guittard line, used by chocolatiers and pastry chefs and now available to the public, that reflects a return to the family's traditional French methods and original formulas.

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Guittard, which makes couverture chocolate -- a high-quality chocolate that contains at least 32 percent cocoa butter -- is one of 10 "bean to bar" manufacturers in the United States that locally include Scharffen Berger and Ghirardelli Chocolate.

Michael Recchiuti of Recchiuti Confections in San Francisco says, "The E. Guittard line is the most impressive original couverture that I ever experienced."

Maricel Presilla, author of "The New Taste of Chocolate," says Guittard has pushed his company to the forefront of the new chocolate revolution. Pastry chef Mutsumi Takehara of the Slanted Door in San Francisco loves the E. Guittard line because "it's well-balanced, complements other ingredients such as nuts, fruits and caramel, and it doesn't have a loud voice."

The Guittard Chocolate Co. dates to the Gold Rush, when Etienne Guittard, Gary's great-grandfather, emigrated from Lyon, France. He founded the company in 1868 on Sansome Street on the San Francisco waterfront. The company thrived there until 1906, when the earthquake and fire struck. Afterward, a newer, larger plant was erected on Commercial Street, and later on Main Street.

In 1955, when the construction of the Embarcadero freeway made relocation inevitable, Gary's father (Etienne's grandson), Horace A. Guittard, opened one of the most modern facilities in the country in Burlingame. His was the first chocolate company to offer high-quality chocolate chips, and it later helped turn truffles into a profitable trend.

As a young boy, Guittard had molded tiny chocolate guitars, and peddled them around his Pacific Heights neighborhood. So it was little surprise in the 1970s when he and his brother Jay joined the company. Both Jay and Horace A. Guittard died in the late 1980s, within the same year, and Gary took over as president and CEO of the company.

So, on the Paris trip, Guittard also took the opportunity to meet other producers and possibly get them interested in his bittersweet offerings. He presented producers with baggies filled with tiny foil-wrapped varietal tasting bars from Madagascar, Colombia, Ecuador and Sur del Lago.

In addition to checking the competition and making connections, Guittard's tasting tour served as an opportunity to check for new trends. He noticed one in particular: single-country-of-origin, or varietal, chocolate.

There are many variables in creating chocolate. The cacao bean, as with the olive or grape, is an agricultural product -- its allure fluctuates with the weather, soil conditions, time of harvest and finishing processes. And Guittard also looked at how those varietal beans are treated post-harvest.

"The flavor of chocolate is determined by the quality of the bean, then by the precision of post-harvest processing methods," he said. Those methods include the drying, fermentation, roasting and grinding of the beans. "In comparing European artisanal chocolate to our own, I was tasting for extremes, purposely to see if Europeans were roasting at high or low temperatures."

He disliked some over-fermenting practices he found, and he realized that the skill of U.S. artisan chocolate makers is frequently just as good, and possibly more exciting than European counterparts. As examples, he cited Garrison Chocolate of Providence, R.I., as well as Bay Area makers Michael Recchiuti and Scharffen Berger. He mentioned their technical abilities, ingenuity with new flavors and the fact that they continue to explore the outer limits of older flavors.

A trend in Paris that Guittard took note of is to make chocolates from molds, a more industrial procedure than hand-crafting the chocolates.

but it was at A l'Etoile d'Or, in the working-class ninth arrondissement, that he was smitten.

There he was greeted warmly by Denise Acabo, an amusing, middle-age woman in blond pigtails, who is as passionate about chocolate as anyone he had met on his trip -- even though she does not make her own chocolates. Guittard offered her samples of Guittard varietal chocolates, which she consumed with disarming enthusiasm.

"And, as she stashed it away in her drawer, I saw hidden treasure -- a small box of Recchiuti candies," Guittard said. "It made my trip to think that a box of confections prepared with Guittard couverture had made its way to this jewel-box of a shop in Paris."